"I sat down in the cafeteria," the Jamaica Plain writer recalls. "One of the famous poets who was there to teach sat down next to me and read the first line of the Sexton poem off my arm, and he said, 'That's a terrible poem! That's not one of her good ones!' "

The eminent bard — she wouldn't name names — found fault with Anne Sexton's "Curse Against Elegies." That poem, along with Edna St. Vincent Millay's "Dirge Without Music," wash over each other to form the outline of an orchid on Marzano-Lesnevich's bicep.

She didn't take offense at the poet's criticism. "I just let him talk," she says. "How often do you get to hear a famous poet rail against another famous poet?"

At that same conference, the tattoo led to another, more fortuitous encounter. "Amy MacKinnon [the Boston-based author of the novel Tethered] saw my tattoo and said to me that a woman in her agent's agency was putting together a book of literary tattoos."

That book, The Word Made Flesh: Literary Tattoos from Bookworms Worldwide (Harper Perennial), comes out this week. The idea for the book came about in the spring of 2009, when two friends realized that two of their respective roommates had three literary tattoos between them. If this number seems high, consider that editors Eva Talmadge and Justin Taylor both have MFAs, are under 30, and live in Brooklyn. Talmadge, 29, is the aforementioned literary agent and writer; Taylor, 28, a novelist and currently a creative-writing teacher at Columbia University.

The book's participants skew heavily toward literary professionals. "There's a lot of people in the book that are affiliated with publishing or books in some way," says Taylor. "A handful of librarians, a lot of people who work for publishing houses, magazine journalists." There are a few famous writers, too, like Jonathan Lethem and Rick Moody. There are also a number of independent bookstore employees, whom Taylor tried to shoot in their natural habitat. "I wanted to make it a thing about bookstores and about the places where literature is consumed," he says.

Still, Taylor estimates that literary laypeople comprise the majority of his subjects, proving that literary tattoos are far from the exclusive province of MFAs and those who work in publishing. (For further evidence, check out the Harry Potter neck tattoo that immediately follows a two-page spread of Twilight sleeves, one of which features the word "Believe" in Edward Cullen's "handwriting.")

With any luck, the book will be used as a primary source by anthropologists of the future who have set out to understand what happened to bibliophiles when physical books began to disappear. At the very least, they'll learn that literary passions ran broadly, and deep, and weren't readily digitized.

Interview: Maya Angelou shares her wisdom Though poet, writer, performer, teacher, and director Maya Angelou has made several visits to Rhode Island over the past two decades, her words of wisdom are always pointed reminders to those who have heard her speak before and wake-up calls to those who haven't.

Whitcomb's legacy It is unlikely that James Whitcomb Riley, a turn-of-the-century poet for a short time considered the heir to Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, ever envisioned his work accompanied by music quite like this.

Female poets step up to the mic While down in Cambridge last August with a team of Portland poets for the semi-finals of the National Poetry Slam, Tricia Henley Pryce says, she never saw more than one woman up on stage at a time.

Exploring deep within Hannah Holmes, the Maine-born, Portland-dwelling science writer, naturalist, and friend to all animals has turned her lens deeply inward in her latest book, The Well-Dressed Ape: A Natural History of Myself .

Woof! Probably most music lovers wouldn’t head their greatest-composer list with Carl Orff, despite the popularity of his violent, garish, sumptuously tuneful Carmina burana .

Rhode Island’s First Family of Poetry Husband and wife Keith and Rosmarie Waldrop will be giving a reading at the Providence Central Library, on Washington Street, on Sunday, April 11 at 2 pm. That’s no small matter for poetry lovers.

IS BOSTON RIGHT FOR WRITERS? | March 05, 2013 Boston, the birthplace of American literature, boasts three MFA programs, an independent creative-writing center, and more than a dozen colleges offering creative-writing classes.

INTERVIEW: THE PASSION OF MIKE DAISEY | February 14, 2013 Last January, storyteller Mike Daisey achieved a level of celebrity rarely attained among the off-Broadway set when the public radio program This American Life aired portions of his monologue The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs .

GETTING BOOKED: WINTER READS | December 21, 2012 Who cares about the fiscal cliff when we'll have authors talking about Scientology, the space-time continuum, and Joy Division?

BRILLIANT FRIENDS: GREAT READS OF 2012 | December 17, 2012 You already know Chis Ware's Building Stories is the achievement of the decade (thanks, New York Times!), but some other people wrote some pretty great books this year too.